AustLit
'In early 1999 I began work as an indexer with AustLit at the UNSW Canberra Academy Library. At that time data was handwritten onto a worksheet by the indexers. Part of my job interview was to give a sample of my handwriting. Completed worksheets were input by data clerks. Large computer printouts were generated and checked daily by the senior indexer, Tessa Wooldridge, before the data was uploaded onto the AustLit database. Worksheets, post-it notes, pens, pencils, erasers and bulldog clips were essential office equipment. When I finished work at the end of 2014, data was input directly by the indexer on to a robust template on a state of the art online knowledge management system. Worksheets, post-it notes and bulldog clips were long gone. Except that in the AustLit @ ADFA workroom there remained a set of wooden library filing drawer cabinets crammed full of handwritten cards. This was the old AustLit Card Index, now archived in Special Collections at ADFA with the AustLit @ ADFA papers, still consulted from time to time when we needed to make sense of a record on our state of the art online knowledge management system that had, three AustLit @ ADFA database versions ago, originally been a handwritten card.'
— Jane Rankine. Proposal to return AustLit Card Index to Special Collections Academy Library UNSW Canberra (11 June 2019; revised 22 July 2019)
I look back on my time with AustLit with pride and wonderful memories.
How lucky was I to be part of AustLit in 2001. To be part of a new, cutting edge and collaborative approach to Australian literature indexing, research and bibliography and to work with a team on such an elegant and functional database. Honing the art of indexing and learning about and using new knowledge management models, such as International Federation of Library Associations’ Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Research Descriptive Access (RDA) was a gift for this jobbing indexer. (I was told recently that RDA was not known as far back as 2000 but I am sure it was.) AustLit was ground breaking and far ahead of its time. It was a bit of a shock post AustLit to find libraries and archives were, and some still are, living in the pre 2000s.
Marie-Louise Ayres and Kent Fitch, masters of their craft. And how lucky was I to also meet and work with Tessa Wooldridge, Jenny Huntley, Lesley Banson, Carol Hetherington, Terry O'Neill, Kerry Kilner, Annette McGuiness, Anne Chittleborough, Joan Keating, Roger Osborne, Ben Miskin, Dan Midalia, Rebecca Kemble, Kay Walsh, Bruce Bennett, Paul Eggert, Nicole Moore and three quarters of the indexers, bibliographers, researchers and managers listed as former team members on the AustLit website. We were a — probably the first in Australia – collaborative Australia wide online team — all done via email!
Some photos and items from my AustLit personal archive appear below.
A small group of Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne based former AustLit indexers began an AFL tipping competition in 2015. We are in the middle of the 2021 season as I write and our emails are, literally, wide ranging. Only a tipping group made up of Australian literature bibliographers, indexers, researchers and their associates could compare the last episode of a television adaptation of a classic (albeit unfinished) literary work, Sanditon, with the final minutes of the final quarter of an AFL match, Dogs v Dockers.
My favourite dedications.
The first found by Anne Chittleborough in a novel by A.G. Hales, Rattling Spurs. 'What a wonderful tribute!', Anne emailed to the team on 19 February 2003:
'I am doing myself the honour of dedicating to E. Morris Miller ... as an Author's grateful tribute to the skill, the superb and ceaseless energy, the courage and care and the heart-breaking drudgery displayed in the task of bringing Australia’s novelists before the Australian and the world's public … Everyone of us owes you, sir, a vast debt of gratitude, which this tribute to your sterling work may help to repay in a measure …'
And this emailed to the team by Carol Hetherington, 1 August 2012, from the acknowledgment pages in Katherine Bode's Reading by Numbers:
'… Reading by Numbers is dedicated to all who have worked at AustLit, and to the careful scholarship, and fascinating permutations of bibliography, that this resource demonstrates.'
My own dedication is to the late Professor Bruce Bennett who led the interview panel that employed me as an AustLit indexer in 1999. Thank you Professor Bennett, it was life changing and life enhancing.
Jane Rankine
10 June 2021
Read memoirs of their time at AustLit from Jane's colleagues Lesley Banson and Tessa Wooldridge.
Read memoirs of their time at AustLit from Jane's colleagues Lesley Banson and Tessa Wooldridge.